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The American Prospect - articles by authorenWhen It Comes to Kindles, Do You "Like" or Unlink?http://prospect.org/article/when-it-comes-kindles-do-you-or-unlink
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<p align="left"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><span class="dropcap">A</span>t night, I find incredible pleasure in my Kindle. I pick up all 7.8 ounces of it, palm it, turn out the lights. Then, the only physical act required is a small swipe of my finger across an index-card-size piece of glass. I can choose to go almost anywhere, as long as I am willing to pay.</span></p>
<p>The Kindle offers the purest form of immersive reading I have ever experienced. There is something narcotic about it. As scholar Alan Jacobs writes, “Once you start reading a book on the Kindle—and this is equally true of the other e-readers I’ve tried—the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else.” The compulsion to keep reading stems partially from the lack of distractions: E-books, thin, gray, and under-designed, shear off the blurbs and author bios and test-marketed book-jacket covers.</p>
<p>But when I am reading on my Kindle, I am not alone. While swiping my fingers across the pages of Stephen Greenblatt’s <em>The Swerve: How the World Became Modern</em>, for example, every dozen pages or so, I come across underlined sentences and above the words a tally: “513 Highlights.” That refers to the number of people who have pressed their fingers against the glass at the same point in the text.</p>
<p>The Kindle has several such built-in but optional features that fall under the label of “social reading.” Social reading is basically what we have been trained to do while we read online. Newspapers and magazines have taught us to like, share, and retweet what we read, and URL links have us accustomed to switching between various texts. Why, the producers of social reading are suggesting as they unveil new gimmicks, should we stop with articles? Books should get into the fray, too.</p>
<p>There are two main types of social reading. One kind, occurring after the reader has finished a book, is familiar to us—Facebook book groups and Twitter chats are two of many examples; although the term assumes a digital platform, these activities are updated versions of book clubs or classroom discussions. Other features are newer, bringing interaction into the text in a way that, like a hyperlink in an online news story, shows up inside the book. You can tweet your annotations as you read James Gleick’s <em>The Information </em>on your Nook. On your Kobo, you can read comments left by other readers about that sentence on page 57. On your iPad, you can download Subtext and watch a video by the author, who is no longer a shadowy absent-presence behind the words.</p>
<p>Back at the Kindle webpage, I can see the most highlighted Kindle passage of all time, this sentence from Suzanne Collins’s <em>Hunger Games </em>sequel <em>Catching Fire</em>: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them” (17,784 highlights). The most highlighted book of all time is <em>The Holy Bible</em>. (Most popular passage: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”) The No. 2 book is <em>Steve Jobs </em>by Walter Isaacson. (Most popular passage: “Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume you are.”) The second most highlighted line is the first sentence from Jane Austen’s <em>Pride and Prejudice.</em></p>
<p>Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, has created a matrix breaking down the two main categories of social reading into a more complex taxonomy organized by whether discussion occurs offline or on and whether it is ephemeral or persistent, synchronous or asynchronous, or just plain face-to-face. (The Kindle webpage is what he would call asynchronous, or informal, social reading.) Stein’s institute has further developed CommentPress, an open-source software that allows readers to enter comments within a text, “turning a document into a conversation.” Stephen Duncombe, associate professor of media and culture at New York University, has used CommentPress to create a free online version of Thomas More’s <em>Utopia </em>“open to read, open to copying, open to modification” and published by the institute’s platform, Social Book. Stein and Duncombe are on the front lines of social reading for scholarly and pedagogical purposes, archiving what had previously been ephemeral discussions into documents as persistent as the Talmud. Social Book allows for fuller discussions among readers than does Kindle; with enormous potential for academia, it permits students and scholars to gather within a text, instead of, say, talking about it while sitting in rows, books on their desks.</p>
<p>Social reading sounds newfangled. But looked at another way, it’s not so new. Reading, historically, was “social” for far longer than it has been private. The concept of reading as primarily an individual, solo act—which the modifying “social” in “social reading” assumes—is a modern phenomenon. Homeric poetry and other oral genres were recited to crowds for centuries before the notion of reading came around. The most beautiful depiction of learning in Western art may be Raphael’s <em>School of Athens</em>, which shows Socrates speaking as disciples surround him, listening and taking notes.</p>
<p>After writing became more widespread, it was often a prompt for speaking, something one used as an aid in orating, reciting, or declaring to others. When Saint Augustine watched Ambrose read a book without moving his lips or making any sounds, he was shocked: Until about the eighth century, most people read by reading words out loud. No one was curling up with the large, bulky, vellum-and-wooden books that were kept chained to desks in monasteries.</p>
<p>This kind of “social reading” continued throughout most of the Middle Ages, as scribes copying manuscripts assumed readers would enunciate the words they saw on the page. Written texts developed from and aided oral communication, and since there are no commas or capital letters in speech, there were initially no spaces between words, no lower-case letters, and no punctuation in manuscripts, either. THEIRSENTENCESLOOKEDLIKETHIS.</p>
<p>As late as the 19th century, Victorian readers could still often aptly be called “listeners” as they sat in chairs in a circle lit by candlelight, with one person reading out loud the copy of the latest triple-decker installment of, say, a Dickens novel. Even for us moderns, reading can be construed as an inherently social act, not as in “sitting in a room with others” but as in “together, alone.” Reading can be one of the most profound encounters a human can have, revealing the inherently connective tissue that is human consciousness. As David Foster Wallace put it: “Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>ut here’s the thing: Even with history and theory behind me, I do not want to see those Kindle Highlights on my screen. Not because I am averse to the digital or the social. This has nothing to do with technology.</p>
<p>It is not “private reading” I crave. It is—as long as we are coining terms—unlinked reading. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, we may need a digital-native term to best describe the varieties of reading now available to us. Unlinked reading is the kind that requires of me deeper attention and allows me to ruminate. It is engrossing—a “curling up with” a book that has to do not with paper and ink but with experience.</p>
<p>We need both kinds of reading. Social—I mean, linked—reading returns us to a long tradition in the history of the book. Academics who are exploring it for classroom texts are enriching age-old pedagogies. Access to what others deemed important to highlight or to conversations about a text in real time also has a democratizing element. The Amazon Kindle page is like a high-level, crowd-sourced CliffsNotes, a cheat sheet for America circa 2013, a fount of data about our ambitions, fears, God, and gods. </p>
<p>But we need unlinked reading, too. What I crave when I pick up my Kindle is absorption, to be inside another world, floating in the flow of narrative or argument. Once so immersed, freed from the existential problems of constant contact, and the narcissistic silo-ing of small experience, I can think hard or feel deeply—pleasure and intellectual work at once. What can I say? I am a modern.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:06:15 +0000218176 at http://prospect.orgAnne TrubekA Museum of One's Ownhttp://prospect.org/article/museum-ones-own-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It's hard to imagine the two-story house on East 86th Street in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood ever becoming a tourist destination. Pizza crusts, empty bags of spicy potato chips, and wrapping papers litter the green carpet. Huge holes dot the walls where the fixtures have been ripped out. The back door is open. "People will spend all day trying to get 10 cents worth of copper," says Jay Gardner, the community-development director for the Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation, as he picks up an old grate and puts it across the door latch to prevent another break-in. </p>
<p>Yet Gardner is excited about the house's prospects. A week earlier, the development corporation purchased the property for $100 from the city of Cleveland and plans to spend $80,000 to $100,000 to restore it to its original condition and designate it a historic landmark. The house has a literary claim to fame: Langston Hughes lived here for about two years, starting in 1917, while he was in high school. He had moved to Cleveland shortly before with his mother, and when she left town he moved into this house, where he rented the attic room. </p>
<p>"The only thing I knew how to cook myself in the kitchen of the house where I roomed was rice, which I boiled to a paste. Rice and hot dogs, rice and hot dogs, every night for dinner. Then I read myself to sleep," he wrote in his autobiography. </p>
<p>This summer, when the Fairfax group discovered the Hughes connection to the foreclosed house on East 86th Street, they decided to buy it. Dreaming big, they may try to sell the house to someone who would open it up as a museum. As we walk through the living room Gardner points out the original woodwork on the banisters and moldings, still intact. He thinks a Langston Hughes museum might entice new residents to move to Fairfax as well as help "tie folks to the legacy of the neighborhood." </p>
<p>When Hughes lived in Fairfax, the neighborhood was home to assorted ethnic groups. Poles, Jews, Irish, Italians, and blacks lived side by side in houses pressed up close to each other on long blocks. Hughes attended the prestigious Central High School, Cleveland's first public high school (also John D. Rockefeller's alma mater). One of the few black students, Hughes was a big man on campus: He starred on the track and field team and edited the literary magazine. During these years, presumably in the attic rooms that are now empty and painted lime green, he began to write. </p>
<p>Then he left. Prospects for educated black men in Cleveland were thin, and he was not from the city, anyway. He returned briefly in the 1930s to help stage his plays at Karamu House. By then, Fairfax had become overwhelmingly black. As industry grew, so did the neighborhood; by the 1940s, it was home to 37,000 people. </p>
<p>Today it has 8,000 residents. Most are older, low- to moderate-income African American couples whose kids have moved out. Some houses on East 86th Street are abandoned with "No Copper Stay Out" spray-painted on their boarded-up doors while others are well maintained, with blooming mums out front. This checkerboard pattern, created by the loss of industry and subsequent drop in housing values, is a common sight in the city. </p>
<p>Fairfax Renaissance Development started a program last year to entice employees of the Cleveland Clinic and other nearby businesses to buy property. The clinic is Cleveland's largest employer, and many of its shiny buildings stand in Fairfax. (You can see one of them from the porch of the Hughes house.) But few employees have signed up for the housing program, according to Gardner, largely because the adjacent suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights are equally affordable and offer more goods and services. </p>
<p>"Being a community developer in Cleveland is a little like being a Browns fan," Gardner says, referring to the city's pathetic NFL team and its irrationally optimistic fans. "We may be 1 and 9, but it's not so bad," he jokes. "Selling a neighborhood is like marketing a product. A city or a neighborhood is a store and you have to sell things people want to buy or people won't come. We don't have enough appealing houses to sell." </p>
<p>We finish our tour of the Hughes house and Gardner and I decide to grab some coffee. But there's no coffee shop within walking distance. "Let's go to Cleveland Heights," he suggests, and we drive five minutes to Starbucks. </p>
<p>it is tempting to cheer the potential Langston Hughes museum in Fairfax as a development that would honor a writer, preserve the cultural legacy of the neighborhood, and bring in tourist dollars. But investing in writers' former homes is not a development tactic with a great track record. There are about 55 writers' houses open to the public in America. Most are owned by civic organizations, and many lose money. The small town of West Salem, Wisconsin, turned the childhood home of Hamlin Garland, a novelist who wrote fiction about hardworking farmers, into a museum. Garland was a big literary deal in the 1910s and 1920s, a Midwesterner who moved to New York and shook up the establishment, but today he mostly shows up as a stumper in <i>The New York Times</i> crossword. Despite attracting 700 visitors a year, the Garland house must rely on donations to remain operational. </p>
<p>Even thriving cities and neighborhoods have a hard time turning writers' homes into sustainable tourist draws. A recent attempt to establish a museum at Langston Hughes' former home in Harlem failed when the owners of the million-dollar-plus brownstone quarreled with tenants. And the past few years have taught us all the fundamental irrationality of real estate. Just as a literary classic can become pulp, a penthouse can become a vacant foreclosure. There are no sure bets. </p>
<p>Last year, at the peak of the housing crisis, the Edith Wharton House in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, faced foreclosure. The Kate Chopin house in Cloutierville, Louisiana, burned down around the same time and was declared too costly to rebuild. Other house museums are limping by, their curators continually having to perform the same tasks all homeowners of aging houses do. These houses only grow older and, thus, more costly. Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, a unique for-profit institution, does not spend money to keep the house and its contents in historically authentic condition. </p>
<p>Because the museums are usually located in residential neighborhoods, getting people to stop by is a challenge. Even the well-located ones struggle. The Flannery O'Connor childhood home in tourist-friendly, historic-house-rich Savannah, Georgia, gets only a few visitors a day. </p>
<p>The neighborhoods that surround these house museums, including the former Hughes home in Fairfax, provide a snapshot of American demographic trends. Not surprisingly, many of our revered dead writers lived in the areas of the country that drew immigrants to agricultural and then industrial jobs -- areas that have been hit hard by economic changes. New York City would seem to be ground zero for literary tourism, but the only writer's house museum in the five boroughs is the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, in the Bronx, which is currently closed for renovations. Until a new wave of famous, city-dwelling authors die, writers' house museums will continue to be clustered east of the Mississippi. At least we can all look forward to one day taking the Dave Eggers home museum tour in San Francisco. </p>
<p>So although it seems churlish, even as a Cleveland civic booster and English professor I cannot get behind a fundraising campaign for the Hughes museum. I asked Gardner if Hughes was a well-known figure among modern-day Fairfax residents. He said that while some remember his connection to the artistic center Karamu House, most of the name recognition stems from the Renaissance Corporation's own promotions of the writer's Cleveland connection. What if we redirected our energy, I wondered, to reading Hughes rather than restoring his house? His books are plentiful and inexpensive. How much would it cost to give every resident of Fairfax a book or every classroom a set of, say, <i>Poetry for Young People</i>? Not as much as the deferred maintenance on the house where Hughes briefly boarded. </p>
<p>As I toured the house on East 86th Street, I thought of Hughes' poem about dreams deferred, which, he writes, might "sag like a heavy load" or "stink like rotten meat" or, perhaps, explode. There is no single answer to the woes of the Rust Belt, and yes, you can buy a three-story house here for the same price as a bathroom in Manhattan. But cities' fortunes rise and fall -- even London was more populous in 1931 than it is today. No matter how much we value our literary legacy, a writer's house will not give Fairfax the product placement it needs to sell more inventory. </p>
<p>It may be time to stop thinking of restoring houses as the answer to depopulating cities and to start thinking about the advantages of less costly forms of development, like reading books. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. ... Build, therefore, your own world." </p>
<p>Huddled in that attic room eating rice and hot dogs, I suspect Hughes knew, too, that the world of the imagination offers more than property, more than the city. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:53:12 +0000148381 at http://prospect.orgAnne Trubek